Long Way Up’s Ewan McGregor Rides Electric Harley LiveWire

Touring 13,000 miles in 100 days can be a frightening process for nearly anybody, however make that journey on an electrical motorbike by distant terrain in nations that talk a overseas language, and the journey is past difficult. Except you’re Ewan McGregor – yeah, THAT Ewan McGregor – who took simply such a visit together with his lengthy standing associate in two-wheeled daring-do, Charley Boorman, documenting all of it for the brand new Apple TV+ documentary tv collection debuting Friday, Lengthy Manner Up.

“I’d lay in mattress at evening going, ‘Oh, what? We’re ready for a break within the snow to begin on electrical bikes, and there is nowhere to plug them in from right here till midway up the nation? What are we doing?” McGregor advised Spectrum Information 1.

That was only a yr in the past, when McGregor and Boorman met on the backside of South America in freezing climate to start a visit that will take them from Ushuaia, Argentina, by 13 nations and two continents earlier than rolling into the comparatively secure haven of Los Angeles three months later.

McGregor, 49, and Boorman, 54, have taken two earlier journey motorbike journeys for TV. The 2004 collection, Lengthy Manner Spherical had them wheeling throughout the globe from London to New York touring east by Europe and Asia. For the 2007 documentary collection, Lengthy Manner Down, they beautiful a lot did the identical factor, solely from Scotland to South Africa.

The 2 have recognized one another since 1997, after they met on a film set and bonded over their mutual love of bikes. 

For the primary two Lengthy Manner documentaries, the pair rode gas-powered BMW journey bikes. For Lengthy Manner Up, they go electrical, breaching a brand new frontier in motorcycling. 

Within the first of the 11, hour-long episodes that make up the collection, McGregor and Boorman check trip Zero Bikes, marveling on the acceleration, the quietude, and the smoothness, however for the documentary, they’re using modified variations of Harley-Davidson’s first-ever electrical bike, the LiveWire.

“I simply suppose it’s the longer term,” mentioned McGregor, who has photo voltaic panels at his Los Angeles residence and has additionally retrofit a gas-powered 1954 VW Beetle to run on batteries. “It made a problem extra of a problem. It’s a paved street a lot of the method, so it wasn’t like our different two journeys, which had been loads of off-road stuff. This added a little bit bit extra drama into it as properly. Gave us one thing to be worrying about on a regular basis.”

Within the first few episodes of the collection, McGregor and Boorman routinely battle with recharging their bikes in distant elements of Argentina. At a lodge, they blew out the electrical energy. On their solution to catch a ferry, McGregor utterly runs out of cost and must be towed with one of many electrical Rivian R1T vehicles that had been additionally customized constructed for Lengthy Manner Up.

Driving electrics, “You must work a bit tougher at it, you must suppose a bit extra about it, nevertheless it’s satisfying,” McGregor mentioned. “It may be completed.”

As EV West proprietor Michael Bream mentioned within the first episode, doing the journey with electrics ratcheted up the drama in a method that recalled Evel Knievel leaping the Snake River. 

“You watch partially since you’re undecided they’ll succeed,” Bream mentioned.

Boorman advised Spectrum Information 1, “It was fairly on the market, and you then’re pondering, ‘My gosh. We’re on electrical bikes in the midst of nowhere.’ And you then begin to suppose, ‘The place’s the following plug?’ You’re trying forward of you, and it’s simply desert. And also you’re 12,000 ft within the mountains, so yeah, it positively brings an edge to the entire thing.”

Lengthy Manner Up co-director Russ Malkin is the one who recommended the journey be taken with electrics, and never simply with the bikes in entrance of the digital camera however the chase vehicles that had been offering help. Each had been pre-production automobiles not but accessible to the general public.

A spokesperson for Harley-Davidson mentioned the corporate’s engineering staff needed to design, modify, and assemble the Lengthy Manner Up bikes in lower than 30 days. Inventory, the LiveWire is a road bike able to trvaelling 146 miles per cost, nevertheless it needed to be outfitted to go off street utilizing elements from Harley’s not-yet-available, gas-powered Pan America journey touring motorbike.

The Rivian R1T electrical truck wasn’t scheduled to enter manufacturing till late 2020, however a pair had been fast-tracked for Lengthy Manner Up. Even so, the primary two R1Ts had been so removed from manufacturing only a few weeks earlier than capturing that they had been little greater than rolling shells. As a part of its involvement with the documentary collection, Rivian additionally constructed a collection of chargers each 100 miles alongside the Lengthy Manner Up path to cost the vehicles that had been in flip used to cost the bikes. 

“We may actually plug in to the Rivian vehicles and suck a few of their electrical energy into our bikes and off we’d go,” McGregor mentioned. “However the first third or possibly even the primary half of the journey we didn’t have that know-how but, so we had been reliant extra on locations to plug into and charging stations in the event that they had been there.”

For Boorman, going electrical simply added to the journey as they wheeled over a range of landscapes that included ocean views and mountain vistas, from rain forest to abandon to jungle, at elevations as excessive as 14,000 ft.

“There have been definitely instances the place it was irritating, and ‘Would we get there?’ However different instances if you lastly acquired to your vacation spot wherever you had been, you weren’t simply plugging your bike in, you had been plugging into the folks and the whole lot round you on the identical time, so your expertise was truly very distinctive. We’d be invited in, and other people had been so beneficiant and so keen to assist. We by no means had one particular person say, ‘Look, I’m sorry you may’t plug in.’”

The Rivian chargers dotting the Lengthy Manner Up route are nonetheless there, ought to one other intrepid, green-jeans motorcyclist wish to replicate the journey.

“That’s type of our legacy that we left behind,’ McGregor mentioned, “so folks can use them in the event that they wish to attempt it.” 

Armchair vacationers can, in fact, simply sit again, loosen up, and benefit from the journey as they watch Lengthy Manner Up.